Many of the resources that we use to underpin our economy are finite resources.  When we have used them up we will no longer have the functions that they give to us. Some people propose that recycling finite resources will enable us continue to use them into the future..

If we were to collect the things that we make from these finite resource and recycle them we could recover a proportion of the finite resources, and avoid using some of the new finite resources that we get from Earth for future use.  

However, recycling can never provide us with all of the finite resources that we need to run our economy.  This is because our economy grows, and our use of finite resources will always grow with it, so the amount of finite resources that we need will always be more than the amount we have previously used, and which we can recover with recycling.

Because of the way our economy operates, this growth is unavoidable –  growth is a fundamental, structural, part of the way modern economies work. 

Not only do modern economies have to grow, but they have to grow   exponentially.  When something grows exponentially it doubles in size in a regular period.  The global economy is growing at around 3.5% per year, which means that it doubles in size around every twenty years.  With exponential growth, the growth that happens in one doubling period is equal to all the growth that has ever happened before.  This means that the amount of economic activity that will happen in the next twenty years will be equal to all of the economic activity that has ever happened before, and therefore the amount of resources that will be used in the next twenty years will be equal to all of the resources that have ever been used by humanity's economic activities. 

This means that even if we have been very diligent and collected and stored all of our waste material that contains a particular finite resource from the Earth since we first began to use it until we have used it all up, then recycling that collected waste will only give us enough resource material for one more doubling of the economy: enough for twenty more years.  After that, even if we keep all of that resource recycling in the economy, no more will be available for further growth, so no more growth will be possible unless we get more of these resources.

For some finite resources the reserves are huge.  However, even if the Earth has a very large supply of a particular finite resource, our economy will continue to require twice as much of that resource in the following twenty-year period as it did in the previous twenty-year period, which is as much as all that has ever been used before.  Within three doubling periods (sixty years, at the current growth rate) our economy will use nearly 90% of the amount of that resource that has ever been used by our economy in the past.  These circumstances all occur due to the nature of exponential growth.

This page is linked from:

recycling finite resources

substituting finite resources

decoupling the economy from resource use

decoupling using technology

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